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Harry is squinting.
Today’s weather, according to Wizarding Wireless Network and as retold by his captain before the game began, is sunny; fine and dry with temperatures ranging from 22 to 25 degrees out. The sky will be bright blue with scant smatterings of small white clouds, no signs of overcast. Harry doesn’t know if the blue part is true, has no slightest idea what blue looks like, really, but Hermione and Ron and Malf—Draco, he’s Draco now, he reminds himself; the poncy git is his best friends’ soulmate, so he’s Draco now—had talked about the weather at breakfast and they did say that the sky is nicely blue today, so he supposes it is.
He does, however, know that the temperature and bright part is true. The sky is blindingly bright today. The huge wet patch of sweat on his back and his pits and his squinting eyes can attest to that.
The curses he muttered to the sky, the sun, and whoever thinks it’s completely reasonable to hold a Quidditch game in the middle of the day in early summer (probably Snape—the greasy-haired man never attends his own house’s matches, let alone other matches) can also attest to that.
His eyes are stinging now. Absentmindedly, because most of his brain cells (not that there’s a lot of them in the first place) are currently occupied with trying to figure out where the Snitch is hiding, he ponders if too much squinting at the sun will worsen his eyesight.
He’ll ask Hermione that later. After the match. If he doesn't forget that he pondered on it. If the heat and the brightness don't make him forget. Can heat and brightness make people forget things? Is there a correlation between them? Someone should really look into it, he thinks, before jerking his head.
He really needs to concentrate on the game and stop thinking about the heat. Or the blinding rays of light currently assaulting his eyes. Sunnies would be neat, he thinks as he blinks his eyes rapidly. He wonders if there’s a spell to turn his normal glasses into sunnies.
Another thing to ask Hermione later.
For now, Harry does what he can to feel a little less like his skin is boiling; like mentally blocking out Lee Jordan’s passive-aggressive inputs about the sun on his commentaries and repeatedly tugging on the front part of his robe to swoosh out a few little rushes of cool air onto his sweat-drenched skin. When neither of those work, he decides to hover much closer to the ground. Not being too close to the sun should help with the heatwaves. At the very least, it should lower the risk of him burning his eyes and actually go blind. His eyes scan the pitch for the umpteenth time, squinting hard enough to make sure he can see the faintest sign of the fluttering golden ball while studiously avoiding other people’s wandering eyes whenever his gaze lands at the stands.
There are two reasons for this:
- Seeing people looking at him in awe and try to catch his eyes will never not freak him out a little. It’s the kind of whiplash that Harry isn’t sure is good or not—going from people avoiding his eyes because they hate the possibility of being soulmates with Potter the Freak to people actively trying to catch his eyes all the time to see if they’re The Chosen One’s chosen one.
- Both Professor McGonagall and Oliver Wood will be all too happy to burn him on a stake if he lost them the Snitch over the prospect of meeting the poor sod God or Merlin or whatever divine being that rules above hate so much They decided to chuck a Harry Potter-sized mess at this person to deal with for the rest of their life. Harry knows how shitty of a fate it is—he’s been stuck with himself ever since he was born, and it has been a complete shitshow so far. Zero stars out of five; one hundred per cent not recommended.
In defence of the people of point one, however: he knows it’s normal, he really does. He’s fully aware that it’s not about him per se, even counting the whole Chosen One business in. Everyone wants to meet their fated half—wants to experience the whole cutesy soulmate romance ordeal, like the ones in the telly programs Aunt Petunia likes to watch when Harry does his chores (and tries so very hard to block out the voices because they get really, really weird sometimes). He gets it.
(It’s actually much harder not to, if he’s being honest. It’s almost literally everywhere; in the way his mother looks at his father on the pictures Hagrid gave him, in the discreet upward curl on the corner of Hermione’s lips when she nags at Ron and Draco to start working on their homework, in the way Fred and George can hold a full conversation with nothing but facial expressions—even in the fond stares Aunt Petunia sneaks at Uncle Vernon when she thinks no one’s looking.)
And while he wholeheartedly hates hearing people call him The Chosen One or treat him any differently over the stupid moniker, he can admit that if the situation was reversed—if Harry Potter was a normal student and The Chosen One was, say, Cedric Diggory—he might’ve been one of those people who think that having The Chosen One as their soulmate was a nice plus. In conclusion: he gets the sentiment.
After all, he, too, would really like to meet his soulmate.
His reasons are much less romantic, though. Much, much less romantic and more of a scientific curiosity. He wants to meet his soulmate, too, but only so he can see for himself if the spectrums A to Z his primary teachers taught him is true—if the sky is truly blue and the grass is truly green and his favourite apple is truly green with specks of red and not all red like his early years and primary told him—to look at the mirror and see if his eyes are indeed as green as his mother’s and his hair is as black as his father’s.
All scientific curiosity with an edge of selfishness, and a very good reason for him not to go out of his way to seek for his fated half.
And Harry—see, Harry knows that soulmate relationships don’t always have to be romantic, he does. But he has seen Hermione and Ron and Draco and how they’d sometimes curl around in a cuddle pile together in one of the larger armchairs around the hearth so many times and he wants that, but there is no way anyone will want to cuddle him unromantically or find his not-exactly scientific curiosity romantic. The stories he’s overheard from Aunt Petunia’s daytime telly and all the primary school drama he’s been a witness to has taught him that much.
Worst case scenario would be the person hating him, like how Anna (or was it Gemma?) avoided Dennis for a whole week despite being soulmates because he pulled her pigtails too hard and ripped some of her hair out back in year five. Dennis had worn a pinched look throughout that week. Harry was not brave enough to ask him if he felt actual physical pain—he has some self-preservation skill, thank you very much—but he sure looked like he did.
The face Dennis made whenever he saw Anna slash Gemma during that was frightfully similar to the face Dudley made that one time Aunt Petunia made him wear his new Autumn sweater in late August because she thought the wind was too strong for late Summer. Harry remembers thinking how grateful he was for the threadbare sweater she dressed him in, the one Dudley grew out of that spring.
It was hot even then, with his hand-me-down sweater. He doesn’t want to think how hot it was with Dudley’s brand new fluffy ones.
Good lord, hot.
Harry pinches his thigh and grits his teeth through the brief pain. He needs to stop zoning out. Or think about the heat. Or zoning out by thinking about the heat. He needs to stop doing that. Any of that.
He should probably just stop thinking altogether.
They’re playing against Slytherin today, and Malf—Draco’s brand of pomposity will be downright insufferable if Higgs gets the Snitch and wins the match, despite it being only a friendly farewell match that does not count for the main league, which his house has already won (only because Quirrel decided to have his go on stealing the Philosopher’s Stone in the week Gryffindor had their most important Quidditch match. Harry couldn’t help but wonder if the man’s master has a grudge against Gryffindors). There really is no need to add fuel to that flame, even if he only has to endure it for a few more days.
Harry scans the field again, this time squinting harder at the stands because bugger it all, he’s not spending another breakfast listening to Draco gloat over Slytherin’s Quidditch Supremacy. That, and he’s been living in this castle for nearly a year now—how big is the chance of him not met everyone’s eyes already? If there really is a soulmate for him, they’re probably not here. They could have graduated, they could be a Muggle, bloody hell—they could even be living abroad. Harry is not going to lose the Snitch over them. Or the heat. The heat can go and bugger itself. The heat should go and bugger itself.
So he squints at the seats, at the goalposts, at the grounds. There is still no sign of the Snitch, but there is someone on the grounds, a student, hurrying to one of the Slytherin stands. No one should be on the grounds in the middle of a game, yet there the person is, a boy, walking at a brisk pace that, for some reason, reminds Harry of a cat. His height suggests that he is either a fellow first year or a short second year, and Harry can’t help but stare at him.
From where he’s hovering, Harry can only see that the boy’s hair belongs to the darker shade, and it is combed so neatly Harry wonders if the boy fixed it with a charm or a potion Harry has yet to learn. He doesn’t think he’s seen this boy before. He wonders if whatever the boy uses can fix his hair too. His hair has always been very wild—another thing he apparently shared with his father, another thing for him to cherish. No amount of motherly concern Hermione shows him can make him feel the need to tame his hair, but he can’t help but wonder if whatever this person has on his hair can do the job. It’s just another scientific curiosity. Nothing wrong with scientific curiosity.
The boy is about to take the stairs when the Snitch suddenly appears on the boy’s back, fluttering close enough to be considered close yet distant enough not to be sensed right away. Harry blinks. No one else seems to notice anything—not even the boy himself, who’s climbing his way up with an ease that should not belong to an eleven-possibly-twelve-year-old. Harry blinks some more.
Ten feet above him, Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet are busy passing the Quaffle back and forth. Consequently, this means Fred and George are busy aiming the Bludgers at the Slytherin chasers whose names nor faces Harry can never truly memorise, and Lee Jordan is too busy cheering at them to notice how still Harry is. Higgs seems to be all too happy to just watch them from where he’s hovering, right beside one of Slytherin’s goalposts. Harry cracks his knuckles and thinks: screw it. He bolts to the stands.
The Snitch, for all its supposed sensitivity to the players’ movements, doesn’t seem to be aware of Harry’s. As if trapped in a trance, it’s still following the boy, who’s still oblivious to the whole ruckus. By the time anyone—and by anyone Harry means Lee Jordan, followed consecutively by Professor McGonagall and the rest of the spectators—notices that one particular Nimbus 2000 has zoomed to the stands, Harry’s arm is already reaching to close in on the snitch.
It is also the time when the boy seems to note the buzzing behind his head.
He turns around, right to Harry’s outstretched hand, and suddenly Harry is face to face with the stiffest expression he has ever seen. His hands fall to the side in shock. He has never seen an eleven-year-old make such expression before—not even when Hermione is proofreading Ron’s essay.
Harry stares at the boy—at the pursed lips, at the upturned nose. He stares—and realised that the boy is staring right back at him. Everything about the boy screams indifference and mild annoyance, and Harry would have grimaced if he doesn’t see the way the boy’s eyes widen just a fraction. There’s something about the boy’s eyes that makes Harry feel like time has been suspended.
Normally, when Harry accidentally sees other people’s eyes, he’d see how bright—or dark—the shade is, comparing the shade of the iris to the pupils. He’d look at them and think That's darker than Hermione’s or That's lighter than Draco’s and move on with his life.
That doesn’t happen with the boy’s eyes, though.
He doesn’t think of any of his friends’ eyes. Right now, the only thing on his mind is captivating those eyes are—how he can’t seem to look away. They’re leaning towards the darker side, but there’s an odd sort of warmth to them, too; the kind that reminds him of seeing the first trickle of blood blooming on his finger when he accidentally cuts it with a knife, of the nice warmth he felt upon arriving at Gryffindor’s common room, of the tips of fire burning in its furnace. Of the bouquets of roses Draco would sometimes gift Hermione and Ron. Harry remembers the painfully corny note Draco had slipped in the first bouquets: roses are red, violets are blue...
Roses are red. Violets are blue. A pair of innocent facts that for some reason rings the one metaphorical bell in his mind, its shrill steadily rising. Roses are red, he chants in his head, as the bell rings. Roses are red.
And then it hits him: the eyes—they are red. A very dark shade of red, but red still.
Red.
The epiphany—those eyes are red, those eyes are red, those eyes are red—hits Harry like a freight train. He feels his jaws and limbs go slack—he can barely hold onto his broom. He'd say something, anything, if he can just control his muscles. It feels a lot like being on the end of Hermione’s Petrificus Totalus, except it doesn’t feel anywhere as asphyxiating. The shock is comforting in all sense of the word, and for a second there, Harry thinks he wouldn't mind if the moment lasts forever.
And then something rams straight into his opened mouth and lodges itself onto his tonsils. Hard.
Harry wheezes. He tries to cough it out—to no avail—only to remember that he’s still sitting on top of a moving broom. The boy’s eyes—the boy’s dark red eyes are as wide as saucers now, eyebrows rising so high Harry wonders if they would fly away from the boy’s face. Harry would laugh if he’s not too busy trying to breathe in between the choked-out gasps.
This close, Harry can see the boy’s striped tie. They remind him of the grounds in late winter, when the ice hasn’t really started melting yet doesn’t cover the grassy ground much. The boy is shouting something, but Harry can not hear him—not when he’s too busy choking because there’s something buzzing in his oesophagus and there are tears prickling on his eyes and his mind is overwhelmed because the boy’s eyes are red and there’s something buzzing in his oesophagus what the fuck.
Harry hears the sickening crunch of his bones colliding with the stand. The pain catches up soon after, but he doesn’t feel too much of that—because next thing he knows, everything is dark.